The Universal

Cleanse the dirt, do the work, sit back, and enjoy the ride.

Word Count: 607
 It was his fifteenth time proceeding over the ceremony now. But this time was different. Mark had consummately cleaned his fingernails the night before, unclogging the spores of dirt from the previous covering. His calendar told him that it had been yesterday, but somewhere in his spirit it had seemed to be decades. Time wasn’t what it used to be. The clock struck three o’clock. He stepped out.

 He dressed in all black, always black, but he noted a white parchment on his collar: a milk stain that begged him to stay. The holy water probably couldn’t exorcise it. Would he gloss it off, not so different than any of his cuticles? Mark sat down and reflected on the one-centimeter stain, a cancer to his attire. He knew he’d let his audience down with it. All eyes would be on him.

 But by 6 p.m., after wedding bells from above, he snapped to attention. He had not acted to clean and he certainly hadn’t prepared his remarks. Though they were always the same. “Dearly beloved, we’re gathered here today to remember the deeds and mistrials of our dear brethren, honored by their life courage, and unafraid to embrace the lessons of their mistakes. Twenty years is far too young for such a life to end, but it is through the grace of our Lord God that we know this soul has arrived at the pearly gates, once more. It is in dying that we live, it is in sickness that we know health, and I for one am humbled by the testimony of eternal life offered to us at any given moment. While our member lying before us had their doubts, they sustained general faith to the end, and in Christ they rest.”

 Mark was always struck by the silence of these ceremonies. He had wandered through that pilgrim town for twenty years, but he could not say he had a name to call to mind. There were the various bakeries which offered him plain, unleavened bread, a vineyard of raw grapes, and endless ocean which he would not dare traverse. Often, he caught fishermen out at the far ends of the rosy bay, gaily engaging in the mirth of the water. These faceless caricatures seemed to float on the surface, devoid of animation despite their lively energies.

 As he ended his thoughts, he looked up from his lectern to see he was facing nobody. The crowd must have dispersed, he thought to himself. It dawned on him that perhaps he had grown too comfortable with this role. The truth was that he did know whom he would bury (alone now), had not arrived at the departed’s story, and had never stopped considering the impact of the sacred ritual for the community. It had become his job, and he wondered if he were as vocation-less as the corpse beside him.

 Mark stopped to expect the tavern that would contain the last earthly elements of the life lost. He opened the steel grey box, a behemoth of an investment in self, and inaudibly gasped at the sight before him: the open, empty, nothing space of termination. He determined to backtrack. He checked for the time, but his wrist was naked. The clothing cooling his body was a pure white light.

 Funerals by the sea had attracted him for every reason he had protested the destination wedding. The endless expanse of the water invited open reception, but time demanded reflection, and the chaos of the shore waves instigated his own departure. There had been no time for laughter in his lifetime. But as his coffin sailed out, he smiled.